The Movie Paranormal Activity

If it's real, why would it "look fake"?I'm not sure I understand your question. You're asking: "if there were footage of the supernatural, but it looked fake or like a camera glitch, would people conclude that it was fake or a camera glitch?"Why would it be unreasonable for people to conclude that footage was what it looked like? From what basis should they conclude something else?

Um, no, I think the reverse is true. Almost everybody - including skeptics - wants there to be ghosts and goblins, because that would be a lot more fun. Skeptics are usually big fans of fantasy and science fiction, and who wouldn't want to be a Jedi with a lightsaber or something?There's hardly a widespread problem of unreasonable disbelief in supernaturalism. Human brains just don't work like that. Everything about human cognition is biased towards finding intelligent agency "behind the scenes"; the notion that there would be any substantial number of people who would unreasonably insist in naturalism is just a non-starter. And you're aware that the end of "The Mist" is that it turns out there never were any monsters, just a bunch of drug-induced hallucinations? And that therefore the guy shot his family for no reason at all? I wouldn't say that "The Mist" is a good example of unwarranted skepticism in the supernatural. (Those people in vampire movies who say "but there's no such thing!" even as everyone around them is drinking blood with pointy teeth and bursting into flame in the sunlight, that's another story.) Well, I think you've answered your own question - it would take a video that didn't look glitchy or fake. No, in science you're supposed to explain the data at hand with the simplest explanation, the one that proposes the least untestable entities. It's called "Occam's Razor", or the principle of parsimony. The supernatural would be substantiated when glitches, fakery, hoaxes, mental illness, and simple coincidence become less parsimonious an explanation than the existence of the supernatural. I don't know why you think anything is being pre-judged, here. Coming to the conclusion first would mean determining that the video was fake before you saw it. If you watch it and then determine the video is fake, because it looks fake, you're post-judging - arriving at a conclusion on the basis of the evidence, not before.

I'm clearly not successfully communicating with you. Eh, maybe that's the alternate ending, then. I've not actually read or seen it, I just recall from the Wikipedia entry. Well, you cut off my quote before the part where I stated that I was talking about the principle of parsimony, not the "KISS principle". Although they're very closely related, KISS is a principle about engineering and the principle of parsimony is a principle about theory construction. But that's not what I said, now is it? True. But that's not what we're talking about at all, now is it? We're talking about people who, when they see a video of the supernatural that "looks fake", reach a judgement that the video is fake.That's not pre-judgement at all, because their judgement is based on the evidence of the video, which looks fake. I have no idea. Maybe? Several photographic experts were unable to determine that the Cottingley fairies were fake, because the hoax wasn't perpetrated via any kind of photo editing or compositing, which is what they were looking for. (The fairies were actually nothing more than paperboard cutouts affixed to stakes.)Experts are people too; generally, they're people who hold a belief in their own perspicacity and consider themselves relatively immune to trickery and hoaxes as a result. In general, the people who think they're too smart to be hoodwinked are the easiest people to hoodwink. This makes absolutely no sense as a statement in English. Can you elaborate?

No, but if all you know is what something looks like, then arriving at a conclusion that it is what it looks like isn't unreasonable.I'm not saying it's right. But, all other things being equal things usually are what they seem to be. Again - if all you had was a video of the supernatural that looked like a hoax, or like a fake, then what would be unreasonable about concluding it was a hoax or a fake?Or, I'll ask it another way. You show someone a video of the supernatural, but it looks fake. What other evidence would be necessary to conclude the video isn't fake? That's the answer to your original question.

Did you do that when you saw "Paranormal Activity"?

Wow, it's like you were able to convince yourself of the very proposition you held when you opened the thread! What are the odds?!

According to the Monster Manual:

quote:

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Supernatural abilities are magical and go away in an anti-magic field but are not subject to spell resistance.... supernatural abilities do not provoke attacks of opportunity and never require Concentration checks.

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I mean, since we're talking about make-believe.